Archive for the ‘art’ category

Here is a poem celebrating one of CME’s little known animals, which emerges at night and is harmless to man, yet people in their ignorance kill the animal on sight. All readers are requested to instruct family members, staff of their departments, and servants not to kill this animal.

Many months ago, I chose this painting of Jackson Pollock as my favourite as to me it represented Nature. I had promised to give my interpretation but had not. So here it is. Being no art critic, please bear with me for when my interpretation does not satisfy you. Any way, it shouldn’t and only your own interpretation should suffice. So analyse away.

I see in this image a view of nature as she is most times – not picture perfect but banal, full of weeds, thorns, scrub recovering after being disturbed by man. But always from the depths, you can hear just out of sight the birds going about their business. On the floor, the mice come out at night, and the snakes. And the insects and the small animals.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor-philosopher

The bush holds this poignant promise of a surprise for the young boy who explores it. This is nature as I see it in the outskirts of humanity – transformed yes but undefeated, essentially unchanged. Life goes on – there is brutal competition and perfect cooperation. There are the gawky bones of a frog overtaken by marauding ants and the delicately crafted nest of the tailor-bird. There is the banal cawing of crows and the delicate duet of Grey Francolins. There is the stink of the nala running alongside and the delicate perfume of the mogra flower. All these are there for people to see – but man is blind. He sees the green tangle but not the life, the intensity, the intricacy.

You may have recognised the name “Lolita“. It was a complex and serious novel of the mid-fifties, in which a taboo area of human sexuality was explored for the first time – child sexual abuse. In the fifties, at the height of the age of middle-class morality, the powerful and ambiguous novel drew criticism, opprobrium and later acclaim. The author was Vladimir Nabokov who has since been recognised as one of the great novelists of the Twentieth Century.

But there is another side of Nabokov – little known to most casual readers, and even to some of us who love and study butterflies – that he was from childhood to the end of his days an aurelian.

He loved butterflies! Since early childhood in Russia, Nabokov collected and studied them.

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

During the period of exile in France, before he moved to USA, forced to move by the menace of Hitler‘s Panzer divisions roaring across France, Nabokov and his wife went butterflying across the Pyrenees, financed by his proceeds from his second book – “King, Queen, Knave“. Nabokov was a competent taxonomist and became the curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University‘s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Later on, the proceeds of “Lolita” would allow Nabokov and his wife on an extensive trip butterflying across the Rockies.

A butterfly’s view of Vladimir Nabokov.

But how should I introduce Nabokov’s love for these small, delicate, weak-flying shimmering butterflies in hues of blue, Prussian, sapphire, purple,violet?

The Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis), a butterfly described by Nabokov in 1944, now granted species status as “Lycaeides samuelis”. (Image:J&K Hollingsworth)

Perhaps through a poem he wrote :

On Discovering a Butterfly

I found it and I named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer — and I want no other fame. Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep), and safe from creeping relatives and rust, in the secluded stronghold where we keep type specimens it will transcend its dust. Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly.

Vladimir Nabokov

This is a poem written, not by a butterfly-lover, but by a butterfly-loving taxonomist. The red label on a butterfly specimen is only attached to a specimen kept specifically as an example of the newly named and described species. Such a label enters the describer, and the specimen into the Entomology Hall of Fame, so to say. A butterfly specimen with red label attached is forever part of entomological history.

Museum curators traditionally affix red labels only to “holotype” specimens — that is, to individuals chosen as official recipients of the name given to a new species. The necessity for such a rule arises from a common situation in taxonomic research. A later scientist may discover that the original namer of a species defined the group too broadly by including specimens from more than one genuine species…. By official rules, the species of the designated holotype specimen keeps the original name, and members of the newly recognized species must receive a new name. Thus, Nabokov tells us that no product of human cultural construction can match the immortality of the permanent name-bearer for a genuine species in nature. The species may become extinct, of course, but the name continues forever to designate a genuine natural population that once inhabited the earth.

The Wandering Minstrel goes on to say…

A commenter in the post (my words) goes on to note that the poem reflected the “vanity of human wishes”, but it speaks, too, of something more specific – the bid for immortality that motivates even the “purest” of scientists. Scientific biographers speak, often with palpable surprise, of the “pettiness” that scientists can display in their quest for the all-important Precedence, but that is merely due to an idealised notion of a scientist who is supposed to transcend all human emotions in his quest for Truth. In reality, Scientists are as alive to the seduction of fame as anyone else – and the brand of fame they seek makes “the glories of our blood and state” look positively ephemeral. Of course poets have long espoused the conceit that words are the surest form of immortality – “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme” quoth the Bard – but Nabokov trumps even that with his “thus became […] its first describer — and I want no other fame.” And although he says “it will transcend its dust”, the temptation is irresistible to read, superposed on the “it”, a triumphant “I”.

Being a taxonomist, Nabokov, loved not just the external magnificence of the patterns and colours of butterfly wings but also the hidden intrinsic elegance with which Nature provides form and function in its creatures. Like the protagonist in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace, he sought classic beauty in the form and function and not the romantic beauty of the appearance in his passionate study of the anatomy of these delicate insects. It takes a singular passion to motivate a person to spend countless painstaking hours studying thousands of specimens, peering through microscopes and making detailed diagrams of their body parts. Nabokov did all this. A taxonomist’s abiding faith rests in the belief that the shape and structure of the insect bodies hide truths of nature which he resolves to discover. That, imho, is the Holy Grail for taxonomists. And Nabokov found it, but never knew that he had done so.

For years Nabokov studied the Polyommatus genus of butterflies, dissecting and drawing the intricate shapes of the male sexual organs of the little insects. The shape of the male organ of butterflies is distinct to a species and has specifically evolved uniquely for each species. In groups such as the Polymmatinae, which resemble each other and are difficult to distinguish, the examination of the male organ alone helps identify the species reliably. Nabokov sat patiently, peering through microscopes to the detriments of his eyes, making neat diagrams, describing the finer details in the formal language characteristic of science, shorn of adornment and replete with terms rarely understood by common folk. Nabokov went on to describe hundreds of new species.

Click here to see a slideshow on Nabokov’s Butterflies in the New York Times

He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related. At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait and headed south all the way to Chile. Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.

Now, there could be very many models of how the butterflies evolved. One example cited often is that they could have evolved in the tropical forest of the Amazon where biodiversity and speciation is very high. In that case the butterflies arrived there from Asia once and a large number of species arose later, each of which would be closely related. Though Nabokov was a distinguished expert of his day, this vision of his was too much to chew for his contemporaries. I surmise that neither zoogeography or the geological science of that time had accepted the idea of repeated waves of migration across the Bering Strait. Since there was no way to prove the hypotheses at that point of time, it languished after his retirement in the sixties and his death in 1979 and was soon forgotten. Subsequent generations of lepidopterists grew up considering Nabokov as a competent and diligent Lepidopterist but not as one who had come up with path-breaking ideas.

Drawings of the genitalia of various blue butterflies in Nabokov’s famous 1945 paper in Psyche.

The scene moves on to the early nineties. The advent of new tools for DNA sampling and genomic studies began to unravels many hidden facets of nature. A re-examination of the blues by Dr Kurt Johnson of the American Museum of Natural History led to the study of Nabokov’s classification. Johnson collected and examined many specimens. As he later described in the 2000 book “Nabokov’s Blues,” written with Steve Coates, Dr. Johnson set about reviving Nabokov’s classification and found it to be substantially correct. In another case, Nabokov had described the Karner Blue as a seperate species while other authorities later classified it as a subspecies of the Mellisa Blue. DNA analysis proved Nabokov’s view to be correct.

Nabokov’s hand-drawn illustration of wing-pattern of “Echinargus” species novium described in the 1945 Psyche paper.

In 1990, a Dr Naomi Pierce became a Harvard biology professor and curator of Lepidoptera. Nabokov’s birth centenary was coming up in 1999 and Naomi started acquainting herself in detail about his work. When she came across Nabokov’s hypothesis of evolution of the Polyommatus blues in a book titled “Nabokov’s Blues” by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, she realised that the hypothesis was testable with today’s scientific techniques. She organized four separate trips to the Andes to collect the blues, and then she and her colleagues at Harvard sequenced the genes of the butterflies, as well as comparing the number of mutations each species had acquired. The mutation rate data indicated the approximate duration passed since the creatures diverged in evolution. Their research proved Nabokov’s “bold hypothesis” to be true. Zimmer writes..

Instead, they found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated. “By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.” Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.

A very nicely written post from the blog “Why Evolution is True”, with more science in it than this post, can be found here.

Click to reach a very nice slideshow on Nabokov’s Lepidoptery from the New York Public Library.

Another of Nabokov’s talents was his skill in illustrating butterflies. He often painted butterflies and presented them to friends.

Nabokov’s love for butterflies shows in his literature also. Perhaps the earliest was one of his Russian short stories – The Aurelian. “Aurelian” is an archaic word for a butterfly-lover. In this short story, Nabokov develops the concept of metamorphosis as transcendence into life on a higher plane. The proatogonist in “The Aurelian” is Paul Pilgram, an entomologist and butterfly dealer who never left his native Berlin. Pilgram lives a futile, dreary life with a unsuccessful business and an unsatisfactory marriage, However he dreams of leaving this all behind and going on a butterfly-hunting expedition to exotic places such as France, Dalmatia, Russia and Tibet which his fate and circumstances do not permit. At last, Pilgram manages to cheat a customer and get the money and prepares to go on a journeying dumping his wife and his business behind. As he departs, Pilgram dies of a heart attack. To give you a taste of Nabokov’s style of writing, I include the last three paragraphs of his short story :

NIGHT came; a slippery polished moon sped, without the least friction, in between chinchilla clouds, and Eleanor returning from the wedding supper, and still all atingle from the wine and the juicy jokes, recalled her own wedding day as she leisurely walked home. Somehow all the thoughts now passing through her brain kept turning so as to show their moon-bright, attractive side; she felt almost light-hearted as she entered the gateway and proceeded to open the door, and she caught herself thinking that it was surely a great thing to have an apartment of one’s own, stuffy and dark though it might be. Smiling, she turned on the light in her bedroom, and saw at once that all the drawers had been pulled open; she hardly had time to imagine burglars, for there were those keys on the night table and a bit of paper propped against the alarm clock. The note was brief: ‘Off to Spain. Don’t touch anything till I write. Borrow from Sch. or W. Feed the lizards.’ The faucet was dripping in the kitchen. Unconsciously she picked up her silver bag where she had dropped it, and then kept on sitting on the edge of the bed, quite straight and still, with her hands in her lap as if she were having her photograph taken. After a time someone got up, walked across the room, inspected the bolted window, came back again, while she watched with indifference, not realizing that it was she who was moving. The drops of water plopped in slow succession, and suddenly she felt terrified at being alone in the house. The man whom she had loved for his mute omniscience, stolid coarseness, grim perseverance in work, had stolen away…. She felt like howling, running to the police, showing her marriage certificate, insisting, pleading; but still she kept on sitting, her hair slightly ruffled, her hands in white gloves. Yes, Pilgram had gone far, very far. Most probably he visited Granada and Murcia and Albarracin, and then traveled farther still, to Surinam or Taprobane; and one can hardly doubt that he saw all the glorious bugs he had longed to see—velvety black butterflies soaring over the jungle, and a tiny moth in Tasmania, and that Chinese ‘Skipper’ said to smell of crushed roses when alive, and the short-clubbed beauty that a Mr. Baron had just discovered in Mexico. So, in a certain sense, it is quite irrelevant that some time later, upon wandering into the shop, Eleanor saw the checkered suitcase, and then her husband, sprawling on the floor with his back to the counter, among scattered coins, his livid face knocked out of shape by death.

Read the complete English translation of “The Aurelian” here. Still like to learn more about Nabokov, his literature and lepidoptery? Erin Overby’s post in the New Yorker tells us more about Nabokov’s depiction of butterflies in other works. And here is a short and interesting free online course on Nabokov from the now defunct Fathom online learning initiative of Columbia University. Here’s a post and yet another from one of my favourite Science Bloggers Bioephemera. Maria Popova’s commentary on Gould’s essay can be found here. And here is more, and even more. Nabokov may now rest in peace, his reputation as a practitioner in his first great love, the butterfly world, having been vindicated.

the grave of Vladimir Nabokov (Russian-American writer) and his wife Vera Nabokova in Cimetière de Clarens (Switzerland). (Image:Gorodilova)

Image Credits

Click on the images to reach the sources.

Some are from Wikimedia Commons published under their respective free licenses.

Jackson Pollock was one of the great modern painters of the world, who developed a very unique style of art, now referred to as “All Over”. To understand Pollock, see the film “Pollock” starring two actors whom I admire tremendously – Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden. Harden won an Academy Award for her role as Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner who was an accomplished painter in her own right.

Pollock’s style is abstract. I first mistook one of his painting as an image of a burnished marble table-top. Pollock used to give these abstracts names but felt that people searched the painting for the motifs and this prevented them from seeing the painting in its true avatar, as a unique creation, something to be interpreted for what it is and not for what it is named. So he started numbering them instead.

Many people tried unsuccessfully to imitate Pollock’s style where lines, shapes, forms are subsumed and the brush strokes create a great harmony of colours and shapes. In these are hidden, like in a child’s puzzle, the images and messages that are present.

"Moby Dick"

The fact that viewing and interpreting the painting is an intimately personal experience and that each person will interpret it differently should not lead you to think that it is just “bakwaas” or what the viewers see in it is a figment of imagination.

While viewing a painting of Jackson Pollock, a good way to do so is by getting away from the classical, analytical mindset. Slow down, take your time, quieten your mind and look! The painting will form its own impressions in your mind, pay close attention to them. Amongst these impressions will be an interpretation that will cause you to come back and watch the painting over and over again – THAT is the true meaning of the painting for you.

"Enchanted Forest"

The one painting below is one which I like best of what I think are his “Nature” paintings. Though Pollock was inspired by nature and named some paintings after natural themes, this was named as just plain “Number One of 1948”.

"Plain Number One of 1948"

Pollock painted all over a canvas- his signature “drip” style lasted from 1947 till 1950h. He kept his paintings horizontal and worked from all sides. He used trowels, hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators and sand, broken glass and other materials to achieve his effects.

"Number 8"

My interpretation? Wait for it. I will give it to you after a week or so. In the meantime look closely at this canvas. What does it tell you about nature?

At least some of my readers by now must have a question waiting to be asked – “Are you kidding?”

No, I am not crazy, I do consider this bunch of coloured lines as a serious topic about Nature though not a single bird, flower or butterfly can be seen in it.

It would be good to remind you that :-

“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
-The Bible, John 14:2

and that blogs should not provide just “fast food”, but “healthy nutritious food” from time to time, too!

In 1859, the year that Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, a large painting, about 5 feet high and ten feet wide was unveiled in New York’s Studio Building on West 10th Street. The event attracted an unprecedented turnout for a single-painting exhibition in the United States.

More than 12,000 people paid an admission fee of twenty-five cents to view the painting. Even on the final day of the showing, patrons waited in line for hours to enter the Exhibition Room.

The room was darkened. Carefully positioned lights focused the eye and the mind on the painting and excluded all else. Curtains were arranged around it to give the impression of a view through a window. Dried plants were arranged in the room to add to the atmosphere, probably alongwith artefacts brought back by the painter from his travels. Viewers sat on a bench for their allotted time and were provided opera glasses so as to examine the details closer.

The painting was “The Heart of the Andes“. The painter was Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900), an American landscape painter. Church travelled to South America twice in the 1850s. Inspired by the great Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, he painted a series of extremely fine landscapes.

Before I say more, I include the picture below. Now, I would like you to do exactly as I say.

Have a look at the image below.

Then download the large 3.4 MB sized image from here or by clicking the image. Look at the full image in detail and appreciation. It helps if there are no distractions. For best results, turn the room dark, shut off all appliances (music, cell-phone etc), calm down, be at peace and then look at it.

Then look at each part of the painting in detail. (Yes, we want you to learn to appreciate art; not eat fast-food!)

Imagine you have paid your 25 cents way back that April day back in 1859 and you have momentarily been given leave to examine the painting all by yourself in the room.Take your time. Get the feel of it. Form your own impression of it.

Having done that. I’ll tell you more…

The Heart of the Andes

For a factual description of the work let Wikipedia do the talking :

“The Heart of the Andes” is a composite of the South American topography observed by Church during his travels. At the center right of the mountain landscape is a shimmering pool served by a waterfall. The snow-capped, majestic Mount Chimborazo of Ecuador appears in the distance; the viewer’s eye is led to it by the darker, closer slopes that decline from right to left. The evidence of human presence consists of a lightly worn path that fades away, a hamlet and church lying in the central plain, and closer to the foreground, two natives are seen before a cross. The church, a trademark detail in Church’s paintings, is Catholic and Spanish-colonial, and seemingly inaccessible from the viewer’s location. Church’s signature appears cut into the bark of the highlighted foreground tree at left. The play of light on his signature has been interpreted as the artist’s statement of man’s ability to tame nature—yet the tree appears in poor health compared to the vivid jungle surrounding it.

To understand Church’s work, we must begin with his main inspiration – Alexander von Humboldt, Church’s intellectual guru as surely as he was Darwin‘s, Alfred Russel Wallace‘s and Louis Agassiz‘s. At that point of time, Humboldt was arguably the most influential intellectual in the world. Humboldt had explored South America at the turn of the eighteenth century. His travel narratives and his seminal work “Kosmos” were hugely influential and engrossing. Indeed, they formed part of Church’s library. Church, of course, was heavily influenced by Humboldtian Science.

Alexander von Humboldt - Church's guru and inspiration.

Humboldt believed that the highest ideal lay in the representation of the unity amidst the complexity of nature, a synthesis of Kantian views of unity of natural phenomena.

For Humboldt, “the unity of nature” meant that interrelation of all physical sciences – such as the conjoining between biology, meteorology, and geology that determined where specific plants grew – which the scientist unraveled by discovering myriad, painstakingly collecting data. In his opinion, Nature was not to be exalted with religious ideals but to be appreciated in another context. Both the accuracy and exactness of data and its aesthetic charactersitics were to be appreciated hand in hand.

Humboldt considered that the highest ideals of understanding unity amongst diversity in nature were the practice of three disciplines – nature poetry, growing exotic plants and landscape painting.

Church retraced Humboldt’s foot-steps in South America, even hiring the same house that Humboldt had stayed in Quito. Church taking Humboldt’s philosophy as gospel, painted a dazzling series of canvases, of which the Heart of the Andes is most prominent.

In this vast portrayal of a notional South American landscape view – no place exists on Earth which provides such a view – Church drew each botanical, geological or meteorological fact to exact detail. The plants in his great work can be identified and compared. They grow exactly like Church painted them. And by including such finer aspects mentioned by Humboldt in his treatises as

“the thin vapour which, without changing the transparency of the air, renders its tints more harmonious and softens its effects…”,

Church paid true homage to Humboldt.

Detail from "The Heart of the Andes"

After the painting’s triumphantreception in America, Church took it to Europe. His desirewas to

“to have the satisfaction of placing before Humboldt, a transcript of the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago – and which he had pronounced to be the finest in the world.”

It was too late. Humboldt died before the painting reached Europe. Church’s wish remained unfulfilled but he went to paint many more beautiful landscapes.

Now it is time to look at the painting again but with new eyes.

Rather than end the post with this sombre note, let me recast Stephen Jay Gould’s conclusion in his brilliant essay on the Heart of the Andes.

“Picture that fellow admirer of Humboldt, Church’s contemporary, Charles Darwin as he stood in the Heart of the Andes drinking deeply from the vista with a spiritual reverence no less than that of Humboldt and Church. Yet he was to go on to demolish the romantic naturalism of Humbodt with a new vision of unfeeling, uncaring nature. He says :

It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes, he is overwhelmed by what he sees and cannot justly comprehend it. Such are my feelings and such may they remain. ”

Epilogue

We rarely get to appreciate art in blog posts of today’s world. Appreciating art is like reading a good book or drinking a balloon glass of fine VSOP brandy or enjoying a great piece of classical music. The tempo of life needs to be suspended awhile.

I hope you enjoyed looking at this fine landscape. If you would like to learn more about appreciating art, this and this link can help you.